The Walther was tucked inside the waistband of her jeans, hidden by the tails of the shirt she wore—a shirt that belonged to the husband she had lost because of Roland Ballencoa.

What if she rang the doorbell? What if he came to the door and she shot him in the face and killed him like she had in her dream?

She could see it in her head. She had imagined it over and over. There was a part of her that wanted that confrontation to put an end to this nightmare once and for all. And there was a part of her that knew she should turn around and run away.

What about me?! Leah had cried. Lauren had spent the last hours berating herself for not caring enough, for not being a good mother to the one daughter she had.

Yet here I am.

God help me.

Why she bothered with a prayer was beyond her. None of the thousands she had made in the past four years had been answered. Why would this one be any different?

She put the note in Ballencoa’s mailbox next to the front door, turned around, and walked away, not bothering to look back to see if he was watching her.

The drive home was made without thought. Lauren wasn’t aware of traffic or scenery or the faces of the people on the streets as she drove across town. She didn’t hear anything. The internal cacophony had gone silent.

She didn’t think about whether what she had just done was right or wrong, smart or stupid. She was tired of thinking. It was just so much easier not to think at all. Maybe she would go home and lie down and spend the rest of the day not thinking. And while she wasn’t thinking, she was going to not feel anything either. The sharp edges of hard emotions could crumble to dust and let her alone to feel nothing.

The idea of that was like a vision to her, like a mirage shimmering at the end of Old Mission Road. She was so focused on it that she almost didn’t notice the car parked off to the side at the end of the street. She didn’t want to notice it, and she certainly didn’t want to notice the man who stepped out of the car as she neared the gate to the property.

Without fully looking at him, she recognized him by the breadth of his shoulders in his chambray shirt, the narrowness of his hips in his jeans, the tousled sandy hair, the mirrored aviator sunglasses he wore. But she pretended not to see him at all as she ran her window down and punched in the gate code. She stared straight out through the windshield, willing the gate to open instantly—which it did not.